


Tunnel vision lights my way

by patchfire, raving_liberal



Series: One Last Time, One Last Fight [10]
Category: Glee
Genre: Alive Finn Hudson, Canonical Character Death - Finn Hudson, Dan's Punch, Facebook, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-07
Updated: 2014-12-07
Packaged: 2018-02-28 11:01:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2729975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patchfire/pseuds/patchfire, https://archiveofourown.org/users/raving_liberal/pseuds/raving_liberal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Puck feels like he’s living in a movie’s opening sequence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tunnel vision lights my way

Puck feels like he’s living in a movie’s opening sequence. Once he has that thought, he spends most of one off day at the Starbucks out Jefferson, the one that’s too far west to swing past on the way to the salt barn if he has work. After he cleans up the apartment a little and eats breakfast, he heads over and orders a drink. Puck puts on his headphones and orders a new drink every ninety minutes or so, spending the rest of the time looking for the perfect song for the opening sequence to be set to. 

When he realizes he needs to leave or eat a Starbucks sandwich for dinner, too, Puck leaves, stopping to get takeout on the way back to his apartment. It was a pretty weird way to spend the day, really, but he doesn’t really regret it. The next morning, he rolls out of bed with the alarm while it’s still dark outside, and he can hear music in his head following him. 

Getting dressed is a little bit of a production, because he has to put on enough layers to help him stay warm, but they have to be easy to get out of when the labor warms him up. First set of layers on, including sock liners and socks before his new boots, he tosses two pairs of dry socks in his bag by the door and walks down to the kitchen. He starts the coffeemaker while he rummages through the freezer, and by the time he grabs his coffee, there’s a breakfast burrito warming up in the microwave. 

Puck thinks about the movie opening sequence thing while he stands there, and he figures if he really were in a movie, he’d probably have to do some kind of weird dancelike movement while he stands there waiting for the microwave to beep. Instead he turns on the Weather Channel, because the day’s weather makes or breaks his work day and his chances for overtime. 

No significant accumulation expected, which means a straightforward shift, and Puck finishes up his burrito and his coffee before filling up his Thermos and grabbing his lunch. It joins his extra socks and his work gloves and balaclava in his bag, and Puck locks up his laptop before locking up the apartment and heading down to his bike. 

Twelve hours, and unless the weather changes, he’ll have the evening free, and Puck almost doesn’t mind the hour or the wind as he arrives at the lot and parks, heading inside for the day’s assignment. It keeps him busy enough, the guys on the crew are decent enough guys, and usually he can listen to music if he’s tired of talking, which usually means the discussion’s turned to politics. 

Puck goes back to the opening sequence idea as he drives home at the end of the shift and it’s dark again. He’s tired and tempted to stop for one of the Christmas Starbucks things, but his alarm’ll still go off at the same time in the morning, so he keeps driving straight to the apartment, music in his head. 

He eats the leftovers from his takeout the night before and stretches out on his couch, which means his legs hang off the end, and he turns on the television as he eats, then remembers it’s time for _Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D._. After it’s over, though, he turns it off and picks up his laptop instead. 

He can’t remember if they should have had Sectionals yet or not, and actually he can’t remember Jake posting much about glee club at all, now that he’s thinking about it, but he sends Jake a good-luck-and-belated-Happy-Hanukkah message before replying to Nina’s latest message, which is mostly complaining about school and their mom. Puck adds two guys from the crew who’ve sent him friend requests and posts a status about _Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D._ and his dinner, which keeps his mom happy that he’s alive and feeding himself, and then he clicks over to messages again. 

He lets his mouse linger over Finn’s picture for about thirty seconds, and before he goes to those messages, he indulges himself and goes to Finn’s page, to the pictures of Finn. Puck can’t help smiling back at them. After he clicks through a few, he makes himself go to the page of his messages to Finn. 

“I’m going to go see a movie tomorrow night maybe,” he says out loud to the empty apartment as he types. “I had yesterday off, so unless I get flexed off Thursday, I won’t be off again until maybe Sunday. In case you were curious.” 

Puck snorts at himself and pauses in his typing to take a drink of his pop. He can hear someone walking down the hall, and he listens until he hears the jingle of keys and the door across from his opens and closes. Because of his schedule, he’s still not sure who lives there. 

“It’s been two months since I moved in here, I realized earlier,” he continues when he puts his pop down. “It’s the longest I’ve ever lived by myself, because I had a few roommates in L.A. It feels really different than L.A., too. L.A. never felt real. This doesn’t feel real either, but in a surreal way. L.A. just felt like a fantasy come to life.”

Maybe it’s because Puck spends so many hours working, or maybe it’s because winter’s starting and the days are getting shorter, but Joliet does feel a little surreal, even though he knows there’s no particular reason for it to. He likes it well enough that he’ll sign another lease at the end of six months, and he likes it well enough that he’ll sign up for seasonal work again. He likes it well enough that he doesn’t see a reason _not_ to stay in Joliet. 

“We can go see _The Hobbit_ next week. I’m really looking forward to _American Hustle_ , though.” Puck knows it’s maybe creepy or not good mentally, pretending the way he does, but not pretending at all feels even worse. He spends another five minutes typing out a funny thing from the afternoon at work, and then he closes out everything else to work on his screenplay for awhile. 

Eventually the alarm on his phone reminds him that if he doesn’t get ready for bed, he’ll regret it in the morning, and he closes the laptop, takes a quick shower, and climbs into his admittedly too-big bed. Until the night he’d gotten the bed built and the mattress on and the sheets washed and put on the mattress, Puck had never slept alone on a full-size mattress. Sure, he’d shared one on their trips to Nationals and sometimes with Nina on trips, but he’d never had one of his own. 

He’d realized by the second night that he didn’t really need a full-size bed unless he was going to start sharing it with someone, but he feels too old for a twin-size bed, so he keeps trying to get used to the bigger bed. After about five minutes of trying to resist it, he rolls over on his side, one arm flung out over the empty part of the bed, and he tries not to think about that gesture, not while he’s doing it and not when he’s out of bed, either. 

The next morning, he hears the music in his head again, but he gets dressed a little quicker than usual and heads over the bridge into downtown so he can run into the Starbucks or the local place for some coffee, depending on how traffic and parking looks. He ends up at the local place and buys a muffin, and then heads to work, finishing his muffin in the salt barn with one glove off. 

It’s weird, Puck thinks as he eats lunch. If he were in Lima doing the same job, he’d feel like just another Lima loser, but just leaving Lima and going to a bigger place that’s near a really big city, without anyone to really fall back on, makes him feel weirdly like he’s accomplished something. Apartment, job, bank account, bills, all of it—he’ll have to keep it up for years in the future, all on his own, and that he’s managing that is something. 

He cooks dinner for himself when he gets home, which means enough leftovers for days and not eating until after he’s already tried to write for about thirty minutes. He spends fifteen minutes while he’s eating browsing amazon, and it doesn’t hit him until after he’s showered that he actually put one thing in the cart. 

“Buying presents for people who aren’t anything but memory’s not a good sign,” he tells himself, but he doesn’t delete it, either. He just climbs into bed and falls asleep. 

Puck thinks it’s a little odd, how there are things he still hasn’t typed to Finn. Not even things about Finn, but about Puck himself, and he thinks that maybe he’ll do some of that eventually. Maybe after the new year. Maybe in January. He tries not to come up with mental excuses about why he shouldn’t, even then. 

He works through the weekend and again on Monday, but as he’s leaving on Monday evening, the foreman tells him that he’s got Wednesday and Thursday both off. Puck turns on the Weather Channel while he cooks dinner, and luckily for him, it agrees there’s no significant snow or ice expected for Wednesday or Thursday. 

There’s nothing he really needs to do, so he decides to pay the rest of his bills instead of trying to write, and on Tuesday night, he takes his three loads down to the laundry room, cleaning up the rest of his apartment while they wash and dry. By the time his standard alarm goes off to tell him to go to bed, he’s finished his weekly chores and has two days free in front of him, not just one, which is both nice and something Puck’s pretty sure won’t happen once winter really starts in earnest. 

Puck still gets up before too much of the morning’s gone, and he decides to go get one of the Christmas drinks. It’s late enough that he figures the Starbucks inside Harrah’s won’t be too hard to get to, and anyway, it’s a lot closer. He turns up Clinton and squeezes in the back of the marked parking spots, then walks back the half-block to head in. 

The line’s a little long, which gives Puck plenty of time to decide on which drink he wants, and he’s still messing around on his phone when he finally gets his gingerbread latte and heads back into the lobby. He sets his drink on a side table, then heads back to grab a couple of napkins, and when he turns around, he runs into someone’s side, and he glances at their arm to notice it’s someone who works there. 

“Oh, sorry,” he says without really looking up. 

“It’s fi— _Puck_?”

The voice sounds like Finn’s, and Puck freezes, staring at the arm in front of him. He’s probably having some weird dream and didn’t actually wake up for the day yet, even though he hasn’t had any dreams with Finn talking to him before. He pokes his own side and winces, but he doesn’t wake up, so he decides to look up, and sure enough, it’s Finn’s face, and Finn’s smiling at him. 

“What are you doing here?” Finn asks, sounding simultaneously amazed and thrilled. “Did I actually mail one of the letters and forget about it? This is so great! Wow!”

“Did you—” Puck starts to repeat, then stops, shaking his head a little as he keeps staring at Finn. “You, You’re.” One of the things only a few people know, and maybe it’s only Carole and Burt and Puck and Jake, because Puck told Jake, is that there really wasn’t a body, and that means it _can_ be Finn standing in front of him. 

Finn doesn’t stop grinning, even though he looks a little stunned, too. “I can’t believe you’re here! How’d you find me?”

“Find you,” Puck repeats, and even though part of him wants to grin back at Finn, and another part of him would probably like to burst into tears, the idea that Finn’s been _fine_ for so many months that Puck was missing him makes Puck so mad that the next thing he does is take a swing, hard, at Finn’s jaw.


End file.
